BACK TRACKING : For Rams’ Donald Evans, the Way Out Was Not Easy

Donald Evans took the last bite from a red apple and fixed his eyes on the hotel lobby counter, where a basket filled with complimentary apples rested and tempted.

Evans wanted another. And another. He could have formed a red apple assembly line into his mouth. It wasn’t greed but instinct that moved him, a deep-rooted notion that if he didn’t eat them now he might never again get the chance.

Leaving the grocery bag empty was an unspoken ground rule in the Evans household, where Donald arrived one March day 23 years ago as the youngest of 16 children, checking in only minutes after twin brother Ronald.

The Evanses were a close family, if only by osmosis. Donald and Ronald slept in the same bed for 18 years. They played together, fought together, bathed together and even ate apples together.

“If ever we’d get two or three bags of apples at home, they’d be gone in a day,” Evans said. “If ever there were cookies in the house, and you didn’t eat your share then, they’d be gone. Me and Ronald, we’d sit down and eat a whole bag of apples. It doesn’t make any sense now, but we thought it was natural to eat what was there. Even today, I’ll eat three or four apples in a row. I’m trying to get out of that habit.”

Evans will soon be shaking a long-standing habit of poverty. In an Evans family moment that might be equated to winning a state lottery, Donald Evans on April 28th became the first draft pick of the Rams, an honor that has brought Evans’ hometown distinction and soon will bring him more wealth than any generation of his family has ever known.

Evans, though, doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry. In the past few weeks he’s done both. For never in his life has he been so confronted and so confused. Emotional issues of great enormity have blind-sided him as bluntly as a defensive end would an opposing quarterback.

It was on NFL draft day that fate, somewhat cruelly, finally placed Donald Evans in a position to aid his ailing mother Novella, the reigning matriarch of the Evans family. She was a woman who had alone raised a family on a monthly government check and prayers. She was the one who kept Donald away from the poisons of the street. She kept food in his mouth, even when many days food meant beans and bread. She kept him warm and clothed, even when clothes meant blue jeans and a shirt.

Donald had already started to price new brick houses in the Raleigh area.

He had asked his mother to hold on until July for a big surprise.

Novella Evans tried, but 65 years of hard living simply wore her down. She suffered from diabetes and high blood pressure and various kidney and liver ailments.

On the very day the Rams drafted Evans, his mother had her leg removed because of gangrene. She died May 2 in Raleigh’s Rex Hospital of complications following surgery.

Evans would mourn the loss and curse the timing.

He will now spend a portion of his signing bonus to tend to his mother’s simple grave, which is lying next to his father’s in a small backyard cemetery off a gravel trail in the backwoods Raleigh suburb of Jeffreys Grove.

Evans was barely over the shock of his mother’s death when tragedy again hit. While Evans was attending Rams mini-camp in May, his defensive line coach at Winston-Salem State died of a heart attack while watching television with his family. Willie Harris was 47. Bill Hayes, head coach at Winston-Salem State, chose not to call Evans with the news.

“It was too much,” Hayes said.

Evans didn’t understand.

“They didn’t even call me for the funeral,” he said. “I was mad about that.”

The enormity of human loss has only been compounded by the pressure of imminent financial gain.

Donald Evans finds the thought of suddenly having too much money almost comical.

Yet while some of the financial needs of his family are very real, some are not. How does he distinguish?

Evans is still a few weeks away from signing his first contract, yet the pressures already are mounting.

“I have cousins coming around that I haven’t seen for years,” he said. “They want to take me out to eat. They look at me as a millionaire. If you’re poor, though, no one comes around you then.”

As Evans spoke, he reached into the pockets of the only dress pants he owns. He bought them for his mother’s funeral. Evans doesn’t own a car. He didn’t have a phone in his college dormitory room. During a recent visit by a reporter, Evans wore free shirts provided by the Rams.

“I can’t identify with all this because I’m broke right now,” he said. “As for my brothers and sisters, maybe one or two I’ll help out. I’ll put food in their stomachs. If there’s a need with food or hospital bills, I’ll be happy to help them. But if they want a car or $3,000 or $4,000, don’t look my way.”

But not all the tension is coming from within.

When Evans’ story went public on draft day, there were more than a few agents waiting in line to lend a helping hand. Evans arrived in Los Angeles wrapped and wound in a package of Jed Clampett-imagery, with a country naivete that seemed ripe for the plucking.

Welcome to Hollywolves.

Evans’ fear of the unscrupulous was apparently well-founded.

“He is such an easy mark,” said Steve Weinberg, who became Evans’ agent only after days of screening and scrutiny.

Evans remembers stepping off the plane and seeing Los Angeles for the first time.

“The first thing I said was ‘Where are all the trees?,’ ” he recalled. “There was just all this city.”

Meanwhile, the cards and letters, about 100 in all, kept rolling in at Winston-Salem State, all from agents with a “sincere” desire to put Evans on the road to prosperity.

Hayes, his college coach and part-time surrogate father, ran interference.

“People were starting to hustle him even while he was still here,” Hayes said. “I tried to keep people from getting to him.”

Evans remembers walking the few blocks from Rams Park back to his hotel at mini-camp.

Along the way he was approached by several bankers trying to solicit business. He made the mistake of wearing a Rams T-shirt.

Evans is faced with other pressures. Many have already criticized the Rams’ draft and the choice of Evans in particular. Evans was a “who’s he?” prospect coming out of college, a player with great physical talent but only two years of college experience at defensive end.

Local reporters in Winston-Salem were shocked that Evans was taken so high. They considered Evans only the third-best defensive player on his own team, behind junior cornerback Mark Wallace and senior safety Derrick Beasley.

Some so-called experts have called this the worst Rams draft in years. Just another button added to Evans’ already tightening collar.

Evans has heard it all too, but he has seemingly held up admirably. Then again, the past few weeks have been spent in relative fog.

“It all hasn’t hit me yet,” he said. “But I’m starting to have dreams, like last week, I was thinking about my mom when I went to bed. Then when I was dreaming, I was crying in my sleep. When I woke up I was crying. In the dream I was saying ‘I miss you, mom, I miss you.’

“First my mother dies, then my coach dies. Now I’m supposed to get all this money. I’m trying to downplay it all. USA Today said the Rams had the worst draft. I keep hearing, ‘Is Donald Evans going to be the player he’s supposed to be?’ I can’t get caught up in all that. Maybe I haven’t realized what’s happened.”

Evans never knew his father, Ruben, who died a year after his youngest son’s birth. Strangely, Donald’s father refused to have his picture taken, so Evans knows only of descriptions passed down from brothers and sisters.

He does know that Ruben Evans made his living the hard way.

“He was a Jack-of-all-trades,” Lillie Burrell, Donald’s older sister, said.

She remembers her father working from dawn to dusk. He trimmed trees in the morning and cut hair in the evenings, moving from house to house after changing his shears.

After church on Sundays, neighbors would bring their cars by the Evans house for repairs.

“It all came naturally to him,” Burrell said.

The Evans family lived in Jeffreys Grove, and it was there that Ruben Evans would meet Donald’s mother, Novella, also a lifelong resident of the rural suburb of Raleigh. They were friends long before they decided to marry, Lillie said. Well, not that long. Novella had her first child at age 14.

When Ruben Evans died shortly after Donald’s birth, a family of 16 was left to Novella.

“When he passed, we all pulled together,” Burrell said. “Some of us primed tobacco. We had a garden. Mama learned how to hold onto her money. We were poor, but we had health and food.”

Soon, though, the family moved from the country to the red brick, graffiti-decorated projects of Walnut Terrace in south Raleigh. It was here that Donald spent most of his first 10 years. The projects were rough--maybe not by inner-city standards--but rough enough.

“I grew up fighting,” Donald said as he stood on a ridge and surveyed his old neighborhood. “Whenever you got a lot of people in one little small area, someone’s going to run the pack.”

The projects were divided up by territory. Evans was a Walnut Terrace kid and therefore an enemy of a Branch Street kid or a Holman Street kid.

A fight broke out whenever someone crossed a boundary.

The exception came on Thanksgivings, when the kids would unite for the annual Turkey Bowl, which was the neighborhood’s best shot at organized fighting.

The game was played in the parched field right outside the front porch of the Evans’ three-bedroom bottom-floor unit.

It was on this field that Evans first learned football.

“There was a little guy’s game and then another one for older guys, from about 15 to 22,” Evans said. “They would end up just hitting each other and end up with their clothes torn up. There was no such thing as touch.”

If Evans wasn’t playing football he was likely down at the railroad tracks that ran underneath a bridge near his home. Evans remembers latching onto the trains as they pulled away from the Purina pet food company, dropping off the cars only when they reached what seemed to be warp speed.

Conditions under the bridge were hardly healthy. Soy beans left by the trains on the tracks invited rats that seemed half the size of passing cabooses. Tattered box-spring mattresses, discarded from the highway above, found a new home under the bridge.

To the kids of Walnut Terrace, though, this was a playground, a place to run.

Back home, there wasn’t room.

“There was a boys room, a girls room and mama’s room,” Evans said. “And that was it.”

Luckily, because of age differences, there were never 16 children living under the same roof at the same time.

Donald’s sister, Bernice, is 28 years older than her youngest brother. Next, in descending order, comes Nancy (45), Nina (45), Sally (44), Mary (43), Ester (41), Joe (40), Louis (38), Lillie (37), Rufus (36), Ruby (33), Elnora (32), Donnell (29), Connell (29), Ronald (23) and Donald.

There are three sets of twins in the family. Donald has five nephews or nieces older than he is. To the best of his knowledge, he has 29 nieces and nephews, three of whom are named Tyrone. He admittedly can’t remember all the names.

Evans remembers well the projects of Walnut Terrace. He remembers depression and unemployment, liquor houses and drinking.

Evans said he tried to drink at an early age but couldn’t stand the taste. Lucky for him.

He stared once again, surveying his old housing complex.

“If I had stayed here, there’s no telling what might have happened,” he said.

But Evans didn’t stay. At age 10, the family moved across town to the Dover Apartments, where Evans would remain until college.

Dover was a step above Walnut Terrace if only for the nearby lake that provided shade and enjoyment in the hot, muggy North Carolina summers.

“Even in the poor areas of North Carolina, you always had a place to play,” Evans said.

And for all Evans knew, he was as rich as any of his neighborhood friends. It took time before he was able to distinguish his poverty.

“When you’re poor and you’re real small, you don’t really know,” he said. “But when you start dating girls, you start to wish you had other clothes. I basically had jeans and that’s it.

“As far as being poor, we never knew the difference. We ate and we had no complaints. Don’t go saying that Donald Evans was starving and didn’t eat because it wasn’t like that. We were just hard-working people that had babies. My momma took care of us.”

Donald Evans is a hero in his old neighborhood. Faceless voices shout his name from tenement windows when Evans walks by his old complex. Car horns toot when Evans drives by in a rental car.

He is also a hero at Athens Drive High School, though Evans can’t help to remember that his appearance in school never brought this much joy.

Evans struggled as a student. He finished high school with less than a 2.0 grade-point average. It no doubt kept him from a Division I football scholarship at one of the nearby universities in the prestigious Atlantic Coast Conference. But most schools couldn’t touch him with those marks.

Still, Evans recently returned triumphantly to Athens Drive as the first professional athlete ever produced by the high school.

Principal Johnny Farmer, remembered best by Evans for his firm grip on the necks of straying students like himself, greeted Evans with a wide smile and a hug. Evans couldn’t get over how Farmer’s countenance had changed.

Pleasant also was a visit to the classroom of Mrs. Eloise Branch, a teacher of Consumer Economics and the same Mrs. Branch who used to pull Evans down into his seat by the ear.

“We’re seniors, and she’s pulling our ears,” Evans said of Branch.

As Evans approached on this day, though, tears welled in Branch’s eyes. She remembered how hard Donald Evans did try in school, and how, despite his low grades, Evans had made it.

Evans is only a semester away from becoming the first member of his family to graduate from a four-year university. He’s returning to Winston-Salem State next year to finish his degree in Health and Physical Education.

Branch knows how easily history might have been different for Donald Evans, who worked odd jobs at odd hours all through high school to help support his family.

“Sometimes I’d see him running from job to job and just couldn’t believe what I was seeing,” Branch said. “I knew he was working too much.”

She looked up again at Donald.

“These are the rewards of teaching,” she said. “It’s the kind of thing that money can’t buy.”

As he leaves, Evans mostly remembers the throbbing pain in his ears.

Now a muscular 6-foot-1 and 270 pounds, it’s hard to imagine Evans as a high school tailback, but that’s what he was at Athens Drive. With brother Ronald leading the way at fullback, Evans was named All-Region as a senior. He was 225 pounds then and, according to legend, an all-around athlete of mention.

Coach Lawrence Dunn lured Evans out to the basketball team his senior season and watched as Evans scored 19 points and grabbed 20 rebounds in a playoff game.

Evans went to Winston-Salem State with few other options. Only a two-hour drive north from home in Raleigh and the proud producer of basketball star Earl Monroe, Winston-Salem State was one of the few places Evans could play football and remain eligible.

A Division II school and member of the Central Intercollegiate Athletic Assn., the university has been allowed to cut academic corners. The virtually all-black school has long struggled financially and has been lenient in admitting border-line student/athletes such as Evans, Hayes said.

Hayes heavily recruits black players from poor rural areas in North Carolina. The best the school can offer is a chance to play winning football--the Rams have won four straight Southern Division titles--and an education.

“We’re not able to take care of athletes like some large schools you might be able to think of,” said Hayes, who recently finished his 11th season at Winston-Salem State. “You know what I mean. I mean jobs and spending money.”

Evans, in fact, worked two jobs while attending school. He drove a bakery truck on the side and did custodial work around the school.

Sometimes Evans was permitted to skip Sunday film meetings to earn extra money.

“There are rules and then there are rules,” Hayes said. “The key is trying to survive.”

There were times when Hayes wondered whether Evans would. The pressures of school and work and his mother’s sickness back home at times became overwhelming.

Sometimes, Hayes said, Evans came to the practice field with an “attitude,” at which point Hayes would federally express Evans back to the locker room.

“He had financial problems and was without clothes and money,” Hayes said. “I just encouraged him to hang in there.”

Evans, during a recent visit, remarked how much nicer Hayes was these days.

It’s clear that Hayes drove Evans, sometimes unmercifully. Hayes said he saw the player’s NFL potential from the day he walked on campus.

“It was the way he moved,” Hayes said. “Anything he tried he could do better than anyone else. We never put him on a pedestal. We kept a foot in his behind. I worked him hard, real hard. I can’t sit around and baby him. But the hope is there when the scouts come. You can see their eyes twinkling.”

The more pressing concern was keeping Evans academically eligible and finding a position for him. Evans, according to Hayes, had “eaten his way out of tailback.”

Evans started 11 games at fullback his freshman year and spent his sophomore season at halfback before settling in at defensive end as a junior. He had six sacks that season and a team-high 10 sacks as a senior. He had also gained about 60 pounds of muscle in four years.

The Rams first took interest in Evans midway through his senior season. Player personnel director John Math visited Evans twice in March and April. Once he tried to contact Evans by phone but was told he didn’t have one.

The Rams had Evans go through a workout in Anaheim in April.

Meanwhile, Hayes did his best to prepare his players for life. He estimates that half of the team’s 80 players came from backgrounds similar to Evans--large families with little income.

Hayes annually held weekend seminars in etiquette, educating players in proper attire and protocol in restaurants.

“A lot of our kids have never eaten in a first-class restaurant,” Hayes said. “They don’t know what to eat or what to wear. I was also worried about how they would handle the press.”

Hayes counseled Evans for hours about protecting himself in Los Angeles, a veritable Pandora’s Box in the coach’s eyes.

Evans still has a difficult time understanding motives.

“Why is it that everyone’s so nice to me?” he asked one day. “Is it because I’m on the Rams or do they really want to be my friends.”

While in Los Angeles, Evans was mortified after reading of the financial troubles of Laker center Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Ram running back Eric Dickerson.

Evans, though, won’t be in the same tax bracket. Based on what the Rams paid second-round choice Tom Newberry last season, he likely will receive a signing bonus of about $250,000 and a multi-year progressive salary starting at perhaps $100,000 annually.

At last month’s mini-camp, veteran Ram offensive linemen Jackie Slater and Irv Pankey sat Evans down and told him to beware the evils of new wealth in new cities.

“They told me not to worry about new cars,” Evans said. “They told me to get a nice place to live. But maybe it’s different if you put all the money down in front of me and say, that’s yours. But I won’t let anyone invest my money. Money is too serious right now. I’m not going to give my money to someone to make a bad investment. If I make a bad investment, Ill make it myself.”

The winding gravel road to Jeffreys Grove is lined with oak and pine trees. Dust and dirt are thrown from a car’s tires as it makes its way past farm houses and tobacco fields toward the old Evans home, which actually was torn down years ago.

“You can see the spot if you want,” Evans said.

In the clearance to the left of the road, a few miles deep into the grove, stands the Pleasant Union United Church of Christ, the family’s house of worship.

It was here that services were held for Novella Evans and here that the normally reticent Donald Evans stood up and said a few words about his mother.

“He’s very quiet, but at the church he talked about her,” sister Lillie, said. “It was very tough for him.”

In the final few months, Donald would come home on weekends to be with his mother. He said they didn’t need words to communicate.

“We both loved each other,” he said, as he stood near the graves of his parents. “I looked at her. She looked at me. We both knew. I was the baby.”

Evans, who was a redshirt his freshman year, almost quit football as a junior to try out for the NFL. With time running out on his mother, Evans saw it as a way to make some quick money. But Hayes talked Evans into staying another year and raising his value. And raise it he did.

But in one way, it was too late.

A portion of his first NFL check has already been set aside.

“I’ll make their graves real nice,” Evans said.

The family may never be as close.

“Momma was the core of everything,” he said. “No one was motivated to do anything unless it was at momma’s place.”

Before she died, though, Novella Evans had the chance to meet and approve the selection of Weinberg as her son’s agent.

She asked Weinberg to take care of Donald.

Lillie Burrell and the rest of the Evans family are there to see he does.

“He’s an unusual boy,” she said of her brother. “He’s not into drinking or smoking or dancing. It seems he just eats and sleeps. If only his mother was here, it would have meant so much. It hurt him, you can tell. She knew he was drafted, but there were so many mixed emotions. We haven’t had much time for celebration.”